How do you put together live-sounding drum tracks when recording if you do not have access to a live, flesh-n-blood-n-beer drummer. What are the best software programs, CD-Roms for doing this?? Thanks!
Lately I've been using drum tracks from Jammer Pro to trigger drum samples in Gigasampler. I'm mostly happy with the results, though there's occasionally something that reveals the machine.
You don't necessarily need to get a program to do this. There are many, MAny sample CD's that have loops on them that you can import as a wave or AIFF file and use in your multitrack mixes. If you are doing computer recording then you can just buy sample CD's with loops, import the loops and edit away. If you're using something else, you may have to get an "audio" sample CD. (I assume that you don't have a sampler).
I'd like to add Drag and Drop Drummer (http://www.dddrummer.com/) to the list. It has both audio loops and a SoundFont and MIDI versions of the loops, so you can get good tracks either with MIDI or the audio loops.
Also Band-in-the-Box (http://www.pgmusic.com/) does a pretty good job of generating decent drum tracks about as quickly as is possible.